The Sound of Money
When someone asked Chet Atkins to define the Nashville Sound, he reached into his pocket, shook his loose change, and said: “That’s what it is.” It was the mid-1950s, and rock and roll was devastating country record sales. Atkins, an RCA Victor executive and guitarist, responded with a business plan disguised as an aesthetic. Working alongside producer Owen Bradley, he stripped out the fiddles, banjos, and nasal twang that middle-class listeners associated with hillbilly music and replaced them with smooth strings, soft piano, and the polished vocal arrangements of groups like the Jordanaires and the Anita Kerr Singers. Kerr’s group alone was doing twelve to eighteen sessions a week by the early 1960s, with Kerr writing string arrangements on the spot while the full band waited.
The physical infrastructure came first. In 1954, Bradley and his brother bought a house at 804 16th Avenue South for $7,500, converted it into a studio, and attached an Army surplus Quonset hut to the back. That building became the first on what would be known as Music Row. In 1957, Sholes and Atkins built RCA Studio B for $37,515. Over twenty years, that single room produced 60 percent of Billboard’s country chart hits.
Velvet and Heartbreak
Jim Reeves’ He’ll Have to Go (1959) was the Nashville Sound’s proof of concept. Atkins positioned Reeves’ microphone to capture his natural baritone resonance; Floyd Cramer played piano, Marvin Hughes added vibraphone, the Anita Kerr Singers floated underneath. The record held number one on the country chart for fourteen weeks and reached number two pop, kept from the top only by Percy Faith’s Theme from A Summer Place.
Patsy Cline’s route to crossover ran through stubbornness and car wrecks. After escaping a restrictive Four Star contract, she signed to Decca under Bradley. Hank Cochran, a song plugger at Pamper Music, drove Willie Nelson to Cline’s house to pitch Crazy, a song nobody wanted because it used too many chords. Cochran left Nelson in the car and went inside. Cline heard the song and told Cochran to bring Nelson in. She entered Bradley’s Quonset Hut studio on August 21, 1961, but injuries from a recent car accident made hitting the high notes impossible. On September 15, she returned and overdubbed a flawless vocal in a single take.
Countrypolitan and the Backlash
By the late 1960s, the string sections grew larger and the pop ambitions more transparent. Eddy Arnold reinvented his career by adding violins, explaining his logic plainly: “If I just took the same kind of songs I’d been singing and added violins to them, I’d have a new sound.” The style earned a new label: countrypolitan.
The backlash crystallized in 1974 when Olivia Newton-John, an Australian pop singer who recorded in England, won the CMA’s Female Vocalist of the Year over Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, and Tanya Tucker. George Jones, Tammy Wynette, and roughly fifty other artists broke away to form the Association of Country Entertainers, dedicated to “preserving the identity of country music as a separate and distinct form of entertainment.”
Crossover Machines
Glen Campbell had played on over five hundred sessions as a member of the Wrecking Crew before his solo career. His collaboration with songwriter Jimmy Webb produced Wichita Lineman (1968), which reached number one country, number three pop, and earned a Grammy nomination for Record of the Year. Dolly Parton’s pivot was more calculated. Her 1977 single Here You Come Again, written by Brill Building team Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, topped the country chart for five weeks and hit number three pop. Parton requested a steel guitar be added so she could plausibly call it country if critics attacked. 9 to 5 (1980) hit number one on both charts; she used typewriter clicks as rhythmic elements, tapping them out herself on the film set.
Kenny Rogers and Parton created the ultimate country pop moment with Islands in the Stream (1983), written by the Bee Gees as an R&B track for Marvin Gaye. Rogers had been recording it for four days and grown tired of it when someone noticed Parton was downstairs. She walked in, and the song was transformed, reaching number one on the Hot 100, the only country song to top the all-genre chart until Lonestar’s Amazed in 2000.
The Nineties Explosion
Garth Brooks’ No Fences (1990) fused country songwriting with arena rock dynamics drawn from Kiss and Billy Joel. It topped the country chart for 41 weeks, shipped 18 million copies domestically, and became the fourth best-selling album of the 1990s in any genre. Shania Twain went further by partnering with producer Robert John “Mutt” Lange, who had previously made AC/DC’s Back in Black and Def Leppard’s Hysteria. Lange applied his obsessive methods to country: small amps, drum tracks built from individually recorded hits, dozens of layered vocal takes. Come On Over (1997) paired fiddles and pedal steel with arena-rock guitars. Mercury Nashville released a country version domestically and a pop-oriented international mix with the twang dialed down. It has sold over 40 million copies worldwide, the best-selling country album ever.
Nashville to New York
Taylor Swift signed with Big Machine Records in 2005, at fifteen, as the label’s first artist. By 2008, Fearless charted in both worlds. In March 2014, Swift moved from Nashville to Manhattan, recruited producer Max Martin, and announced 1989 as her “first documented, official pop album.” She had used country as a launchpad and discarded it in plain view.
The vacuum she left was filled by what journalist Jody Rosen labeled “bro-country” in New York magazine in August 2013. Florida Georgia Line’s Cruise (2012) became the best-selling digital country song ever, with seven million copies sold and 24 weeks at number one. Research estimated 45 percent of country’s best sellers in the mid-2010s fit the template. Zac Brown called Luke Bryan’s That’s My Kind of Night “the worst song I’ve ever heard.” Aldean’s response: “Nobody gives a shit what u think.”
In 2019, Billboard pulled Lil Nas X’s Old Town Road from Hot Country Songs after one week, stating it did not “embrace enough elements of today’s country music.” The Billy Ray Cyrus remix then held the Hot 100’s number one for 19 weeks. Kacey Musgraves’ Golden Hour (2018) wove country songwriting through disco and electronica, won Album of the Year at the Grammys (only the fourth country album to do so), and was largely ignored by country radio.
Country pop has never been a stable genre. It is a negotiation, renewed every decade, between Nashville’s identity and the mainstream’s appetite, between the sound of a steel guitar and the sound of money.
Essential Listening
- Patsy Cline – Showcase (1961)
- Jim Reeves – He’ll Have to Go (1960)
- Glen Campbell – Wichita Lineman (1968)
- Dolly Parton – Here You Come Again (1977)
- Kenny Rogers – The Gambler (1978)
- Garth Brooks – No Fences (1990)
- Shania Twain – Come On Over (1997)
- Faith Hill – Breathe (1999)
- Carrie Underwood – Some Hearts (2005)
- Taylor Swift – Fearless (2008)
- Kacey Musgraves – Golden Hour (2018)
- Dolly Parton & Kenny Rogers – Once Upon a Christmas (1984)